The present application relates generally to an improved data processing apparatus and method and more specifically to mechanisms for delaying interrupts for transaction-execution facilities within processors.
A transactional-execution facility provides a concurrency mechanism designed to facilitate improved parallelism in a multiprocessing environment. When a transaction is successfully completed by a processor, multiple fetch and store accesses made by the processor appear to occur concurrently as observed by other processors and a channel subsystem. Successful completion of a transaction requires that storage accesses made during a transaction do not conflict with accesses made by other processors and by the channel subsystem. However, a transaction appears to a processor as a sequence of instructions, which may be aborted and retried.
Interrupts, such as an asynchronous timer interrupt, comparator interrupt, or the like, are a potential problem during such a transaction sequence, since these types of interrupts abort the transactional-execution (TX) sequences and could potentially prevent such a transactional-execution sequence from ever completing. Thus, some types of interrupts conflict with the requirement of a transaction to finally complete.